Several interesting articles hit the Web recently about new Intel-related stuff. First of all, we have EBNews reporting that Intel's Brookdale chipset that mates the P4 and SDRAM is sampling in Taiwan, and motherboard makers already have samples in hand to get working on. SharkyExtreme put up a huge review of a Dell Dimension 8100 featuring a Pentium 4 at 1.3GHz that is now shipping. They put up some benchmarks, but nothing for comparison. Of course, it shipped with PC800 RDRAM, which is now an option at the Dell website. This was not the case when the Dimension 8100s first hit the scene. The upgrade from 128MB of PC600 to PC800 is only $30 now, and well worth it. The 1.3GHz P4 will be the low-end P4 until Brookdale hits. Approaching from the other side, DDR chipsets are coming out that will support the Pentium III, and Anand reviewed a motherboard using Via's Apollo Pro 266 and PC2100 DDR. The gist of it is that the junky old i815 with PC133 SDR memory is better in most benchmarks than a Pentium III DDR board with DDR memory. The problem? The Pentium III system bus only supports 1.07Gbyte/second transfer rate, and that's not enough to show the benefit of DDR. Thinking of mixing Pentium IIIs and DDR? Don't bother. If you want DDR, go with an Athlon and a 133MHz*2 system bus.

USER COMMENTS 3 comment(s)

1.3 P4(5:41pm EST Fri Jan 19 2001)Snarkey got 155.7 fps for QIII at 640 x 480 on the 1.3 P4 under WinME – Tom's got 156 fps for a 1.0G PIII under Win98. Thing is, that's about the ONLY test that the faster P-4s beat the PIII on in the Tom's tests. Looks like the 1.3 P4 IS slower than the 1.0 PIII. - by rede duh numbahs

New Benchmarks(7:55pm EST Sat Jan 20 2001)I love Q3 as much as the next guy, but I am soooo sick of the Q3 fps count being the default benchmark for processors and video cards. Can we get a new benchmark going? PLEASE!?!? - by jonafi

Re: Benchmarks(9:57pm EST Sat Jan 20 2001)The reason for even looking at QIII benchmarks is to try to find SOMETHING to compare the Snarkey 1.3P4 numbahs to. The Snarkey 1.3 test (1) ran no other CPUs to compare with, (2) used WinME (a first for any tests, including other Snarkey tests, that I've found) and (3) 3 of their 4 “benchmarks” were tests they never ran before! Like Rob said, there ain't nothing to compare these “benchmarks” to. The QIII numbah is all there is, and how good it is for comparison is questionable. (Snarkey's WinME vs Tom's use of Win98 in the 1.4/1.5 P4/PIII/T-bird comparison tests.) - by rede duh numbahs